Of iPhones and some beautiful forms
I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform — meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture — tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari — it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has — to use a commenter’s phrase — the faint whiff of horse manure.)
So that’s that. I now want to remark a little on that iPhone review I just mentioned. Bruce Tognazzi is no Joe Blogger, he was Apple employee #66 and is a famous interaction designer. His website, AskTog, is a classic resource on interface design. But it’s not his interaction insights I want to point out now — though there are plenty of good ones. What impressed me most was his language. Three quotes in particular strike me as true language-forging moments.
What strikes me about the iPhone interface in general is that it gives ordinary people access to features that have been the private purview of the young and the geeky. For example, cell phones have long had contact lists, but they were typically difficult to build, maintain, and sync.
The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.
The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.
High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase — electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.” E
Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.
There’s an image! It reminds me a lot, both alluding to pseudo-scientific scienceWP, WP, of that classic Spanish insult, “No tener ni dos dedos de frente!” (“Not have even two fingers of forehead!”) — trying to find an appropriate translation, btw, I stumbled upon an instant new classic, “Tiraron al niño y se quedaron con la placenta F !_” (“They threw the child and kept the placenta!”).
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Of course I’d vote for the platform being open to outside development, but then again when Apple has a closed process end to end they combine software and hardware into a compelling all around experience. You know the experience of the iPhone will degrade once 3rd party stuff is loaded on the phone.
See http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/theres-cross-platform-tempest-in.html for some thoughts on this. Also a great read from a programming point of view.
The web may not be such a bad lifeline for functionality on the phone. I’ve found that while on the go my computing needs are not organizing large amounts of information (better suited to a large format computer) but reading bits of news and email. Checking balances, or scores, or stocks (not that I check stocks) etc.
Security does sound suspicous as a reason for the restrictions, though the functionality of the phone seems like it has direct access to user information from Cingular. IE the voice mail browser, perhaps they are worried that poorly written apps will pound the servers and degrade service for everyone?RE: “They threw the child and kept the placenta!" that’s very similar to the English expression “Throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Though I’ve never heard the placenta version. Kind of gross.
-Joshum i thought that “the young and the geeky” was a snowclone of “the young and the restless”?
Is the link to Job's brilliant demo supposed to direct the Ask Tog review?
Btw, when I read the “young and geeky” part, a song immediately came to my mind. Its called “white and nerdy”, and it really is a terrible song. You should check it out! hehechemito: No, it isn’t supposed to. Corrected. Thanks!
Heard the song. Weird Al Yankovic plays it and it’s every bit as bad as you said it would be :). Scary how accurate he paints the nerdy type, though perhaps it’s scarier than I know just how accurate he is being…Erasmo: Yes! But it is also a snowclone of that other inevitable refrain, “to be young and pretty”. It is from a weird, subjective mixture of both perspectives that I found it fascinating.
Josh: Yes, the insult’s a shocker!I don’t know what to think about the iPhone anymore. I have this haunting suspicion lately that maybe it was the right decision, for much that I despise it. Maybe the portable computer has reached maturity before its parent, the PC, and now finds no need for software fiddlers and hobbyists anymore. Maybe that’s the cost of mainstream-ness. Maybe each generation of technological hobbyists finds itself eventually pushed out of the game when transparency and openness have to give to performance and simplicity. Maybe.
It’s just that there’s so much we could do with the iPhone! The first multitouch interface! Who’s going to stumble into its true killerapp?Erasmo: Here’s another interesting coinage that might help explain that “the young and the geeky”,
bq(quote). And, unfortunately, just like Emacs, both applications are often relegated to niche power-users while mom-and-dad computer users have moved on to more straight-forward, simplistic and user-friendly software. (Tinderbox as a Writer's Tool)“Mom-and-dad”. Notice how it seems to be a mere snowclone of a previous well-known phrase (‘mom-and-pop’). Notice how it’s rather an original jokey half-insult. Notice the ageismWP. Notice it has “digital” written all over. “The young and the geeky” is all that— turned into a jokey half-compliment.
me pasaron el link a este divertido articulo que contiene joyitas como:
el link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html
laugh it out!!
Heh! Fantastic! Insult truly is an art-form.
half insult, gotta love that
..and speaking of hi-tech jewellry:
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